Stardew Valley Multiplayer Details Revealed, Coming Early 2018

A beta is planned for later this year.

A blog post on the official Stardew Valley site has announced details about its upcoming multiplayer mode, while also revealing that the feature won’t be coming until early 2018.

The post reveals that multiplayer will be played through players' ability to build up to three cabins on their farms for “farmhands,” which will controlled by other players.

“Farmhands can do almost anything the main player can do,” the post explains. “They can farm, mine, fight, fish, forage, marry NPCs and take part in festivals.” However, certain decisions like when to sleep and when to start or end a festival can only be made by the main player.

Players will even be able to marry each other, although the specifics of how that will play out are still being worked out. Player-to-player marriage will not use the mermaid pendant, though.

Multiplayer won’t require players to set up or run a server, allowing you to simply invite friends to your game through Steam (or similar methods on consoles). Multiplayer will instead only be online, with no plans for local multiplayer or split-screen at this time. The post said that “15,000 lines of code have been rewritten,” and almost every source file had to be changed in some way to facilitate the multiplayer addition.

A beta test will be run for Steam users toward the end of the year, followed by the official 1.3 patch for PC, Mac, and Linux early next year. Consoles will receive the 1.3 patch some time after, starting with the Nintendo Switch, but Chucklefish warns that the size of the update means it will take a while to roll out on every platform.